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2015-05-30

The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s scoop has been disgraceful

Vatic Note: This is up because we have so few real reporters of integrity anymore, that this assault by the MSM, on Seymour Hersh, demanded defense for purposes of helping ourselves. He has broken more stories that proved to be right than any other reporter we know.

I believe the reason they are going after him, is for several reasons:

1. The MSM approval rating among the general population has dropped to a record low of 19%. That is simply unheard of and thus, many readers are going to the internets alternative press for their news and truth. That is why Veterans today and some others are seriously under attack.

2. Seymour Hersh broke the story on Abu Ghraib about the sexual torture of little children in Iraq to get their parents totalk. That one was a real bomb dropper. He is becoming a serious threat to the powers that be AND A THREAT TO THEIR AGENDA. 3. Seymour is considered MSM, and is reporting as if he is alternative news reporting which is where the truth is. What that does is highlight to many readers the serious CONTROL the khazar "owners" of the press have over their own news productions, both in print and electronic. The awareness level, in this country is rapidly rising and is at a level I had never seen before. Everyone knows to a more or lesser degree the basics, about what is going on and more importantly WHO IS DOING IT and who they control and how, they control them.

Now, the MSM is not only not taken seriously and laughed at when they report the propoganda and disinfo, but it also undermines the purpose for the MSM which is to act as the "brain washing" and "Mind control" vehicle to control the "thoughts of the general public and direct them in the manner desired by the khazar ziionists. For the FIRST TIME, EVER, ITS NOT WORKING.

I listen to CBS hourly news headlines on my local radio station and when they start this fear porn about ISIS, I laugh my head off. I can NEVER take CBS seriously ever again. Same with the news paper "USA Today"...... I read the headlines and keep saying to myself. "Oh, my Gawd, we can't trust anything these publications feed us." That was one of the most disorienting experiences of my life, to realize and understand that. Its a sea change in our system of information gathering. I do not know if they can ever recover.

4. Another indirect impact of this issue, is how the powers that be are beginning to infiltrate the alternative press groups on the net, and doing so on both left and right. What is interesting is they are getting caught almost right away.
(pat, talk about censoring and banning)

Seymour Hersh has done the public a great service by breathing life into questions surrounding the official narrative
of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build
off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with
additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down
the messenger.

Barrels of ink have been spilled ripping apart Hersh’s character,
while barely any follow-up reporting has been done to corroborate or
refute his claims—even though there’s no doubt that the Obama
administration has repeatedly misinformed and misled the public about the incident. Even less attention has been paid to the little follow-up reporting that we did
get, which revealed that the CIA likely lied about its role in finding
bin Laden, which it used to justify torture to the public.

Hersh has attempted to force the media to ask questions about its
role in covering a world-shaping event—but it’s clear the media has
trouble asking such questions if the answers are not the ones they want
to hear.

Hersh’s many critics, almostword-for-word,
gave the same perfunctory two-sentence nod to his best-known
achievements—breaking the My Lai massacre in 1969 (for which he won the
Pulitzer) and exposing the Abu Ghraib torture scandal 35 years
later—before going on to call him every name in the book: “conspiracy
theorist,” “off the rails,” “crank.”

Yet most of this criticism, over
the thousands of words written about Hersh’s piece in the last week, has
amounted to “That doesn’t make sense to me,” or “That’s not what
government officials told me before,” or “How are we to believe his
anonymous sources?”

While there’s no way to prove or disprove every assertion Hersh makes
without re-reporting the whole story, let’s look at the overarching
criticisms one by one:

Conspiracy theory

No phrase has been bandied about more than “conspiracy theory” in describing Hersh’s reporting. Critics argue
that he’s accusing “hundreds of people across three governments of
staging a massive international hoax that has gone on for years.” How
could that be possible?

First of all, denigrating a legendary reporter who has broken more
major stories than almost anyone alive as a “conspiracy theorist”
because his story contained a few details a little too implausible for
some people’s taste is beyond insulting.

A conspiracy theory in the
traditional sense would be something like The US government is covering up the fact that bin Laden is still alive,
not accusing the administration of telling a story about a highly
classified matter that differs from the truth—something it does all the
time.

But beyond that, it is extraordinarily naive to think the government
is incapable of keeping a large secret involving dozens, hundreds, or
even thousands of people. I am reminded of this passage from the memoirs
of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who knows a thing or
two about how government secrecy works. Not only is the idea that you can’t keep secrets in Washington “flatly false,” Ellsberg writes, but by repeating it you’re doing the government’s work for them.

[Such sayings] are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering
and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of
keeping secrets well. Of course eventually many secrets do get out that
wouldn’t in a fully totalitarian society. But the fact is that the
overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public …
The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and
the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to
many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive
branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders. [emphasis added]

As a simple example, which Hersh himself stated in this fascinating On The Media interview,
how many people knew about the Bush administration’s manipulation of
intelligence before the Iraq war? Hundreds? Over a thousand? How many
knew about the NSA’s mass phone metadata program aimed at Americans
until Edward Snowden revealed it? A thousand? Ten thousand? It stayed
secret for more than seven years until a single person—a contractor, not an NSA employee—exposed it.
If that doesn’t convince you, read about two other recent agreements about assassinations, one with Pakistan and another with Yemen.
Both stayed secret for years without the public knowing. The old adage
that “three people can only keep a secret if two are dead” is a fantasy,
and journalists should stop mindlessly repeating it. Anonymous sources
It has been rich watching journalists fall over each other to see who
can more vehemently criticize Hersh’s use of anonymous sources, despite
the fact that using anonymous sources is a tried-and-true Washington
ritual that receives almost no criticism in day-to-day reporting. Banal
sound bites are regularly printed on the front pages without names
attached, and entire press conferences are held every day with “senior
government officials” who refuse to be named. (One of the few mainstream
journalists who consistently points this out is Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times’ public editor.)
According to the excellent Twitter account @NYTAnon, the Times
published at least 20 stories relying on anonymous sources in the five
days after the Hersh story went online Sunday night, on topics ranging
from new Facebook features to strife among Democrats over the stalled trade agreement to Cablevision dropping its bid for the Daily News.
Imagine if reporters aimed a tenth of the criticism at those stories
that they aimed at Hersh. Predictably, though, we’ve barely heard a
peep.
Indeed, anonymity is sometimes warranted, and the idea that Hersh’s
sources were anonymous should not come as a surprise. These are highly
classified operations. The Defense Department has openly threatened to prosecute people for talking about the bin Laden raid, even as the CIA leaks its own version of events to friendly reporters and movie producers.
It’s not out of line to criticize Hersh’s sourcing, or to question
his informants’ knowledge. Should he have relied on more sources than he
did? Possibly. But Hersh has said in multiple interviews that, while
the crux of the story came from one person, he confirmed the details
with many others. This has been conveniently ignored by his critics. The CIA
The venom and vitriol from Hersh’s journalistic colleagues has been
especially astonishing given their kid-gloves treatment of one of the
main players in Hersh’s story, the CIA.
Most journalists would never dream of confronting CIA officials with
the same aggressiveness they now direct at Hersh—even though, less than
six months ago, the Senate released a 500-page report documenting in
meticulous detail the dozens of times the CIA blatantly lied to the public, the press, and Congress about torture over the past decade.
Hersh’s assertion, which has by now been at least partially confirmed
by multiple news organizations, that bin Laden was found thanks to a
“walk-in” tip—rather than by tracking his courier as the government has
claimed—should be a major scandal. For years, the CIA has said it found
bin Laden thanks to information about his personal courier—information
that was obtained by means of torture.
Besides one piece by Huffington Post’s Ali Watkins,
the press has barely made a peep about the fact that the CIA’s argument
about bin Laden and torture—one that Hollywood made a movie about!—is a
lie. Meanwhile, Slate ran five hit jobs on Hersh within 36 hours. Perhaps that’s why Hersh treated their reporter with contempt during this already-legendary interview.
We know that the administration made many assertions about the bin Laden raid in its aftermath that turned out to be false.
The purported details, many given to reporters “anonymously,” were
downright fantastical—yet reporters dutifully printed them just the
same. We also know that the government ordered the photos of bin Laden’s body destroyed—possibly in violation of federal law—and,
in an unprecedented move, had all information about the raid
transferred to the CIA, where it can’t be accessed through Freedom of
Information Act requests. John Kerry told reporters directly
to “shut up and move on.” How Hersh himself deserves more scrutiny than
these disturbing moves by the government is beyond comprehension.
Largely ignored in this is debate is the opinion of longtime New York Times
Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent Carlotta Gall, who has more
knowledge of the region in one finger than most of Hersh’s critics put
together. She wrote in the Times this week
that she “would not necessarily dismiss [Hersh’s] claims immediately”
and that “he is following up on a story that many of us assembled parts
of.” Of his claim that an informant, rather than a courier, led the CIA
to bin Laden, Gall wrote that “my own reporting tracks with Hersh’s.”
Then there’s Robert Baer, the highly regarded former CIA officer (and the inspiration for Stephen Gaghan and George Clooney’s Syriana). He refused to criticize Hersh’s story when asked on a podcast and repeatedly insisted that the administration’s story had to be false. Baer, a CNN contributor, was not invited on CNN to say this, of course. Instead CNN had on torture cheerleader Philip Mudd, who proceeded to trash Hersh’s story as “nonsense” while largely avoiding specifics. Politico uncritically quoted CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, one of the agency’s most notorious liars about WMDs in Iraq, as their proof that Hersh was wrong. The author of the Politico piece later admitted to The Intercept that “spokespersons like Harlow are ‘usually the least informed in the spy world.’ ”
This is not to say all the assertions contained in Hersh’s story are
accurate. Some may turn out not to be true; I simply don’t know. But neither do any of Hersh’s critics,
because, unfortunately, the flippant blog posts dismissing Hersh out of
hand outnumber follow-up reporting on his stories by about 50 to one.
Hersh does not need me or anyone else to defend him—he’s entirely
capable of doing that himself, as he has been doing on national
television and radio all week, in response to the kind of skeptical
questioning that most reporters would never dare to direct at government
officials who had lied to their face. “I’ve been around a long time,” Hersh told CNN, “and I understand the consequences of what I’m saying.” It’s a shame others don’t.
All this brings to mind a story from earlier in Hersh’s career, when,
as a relatively unknown reporter in Vietnam, he put together the pieces
of his My Lai scoop. At first, no one would listen. He tried to sell the story to Life and Look;
both turned him down. It ended up going out on a little known wire
service known as Dispatch News Service. Twenty of Dispatch’s 50
customers rejected it.
Within months, of course, Hersh’s stories would be on the front page of The New York Times. He soon started reporting on intelligence agencies. In 1974 he broke the story that the CIA was systematically spying on Americans in violation of federal law. The rest of the media ridiculed it.
They questioned his sourcing while calling the story “exaggerated” and
“overwritten and under-researched.” A year later, CIA director William
Colby was forced to admit to Congress that it was all true.Trevor Timm is the executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation,
a non-profit organization that supports and defends journalism
dedicated to transparency and accountability. He is also a twice-weekly columnist for the Guardian, where he writes about privacy, national security, and the media.

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